Spoondoodles or whatever their name is has said they don't plan to mine, other than 24 hours of burn in testing which they donate to charity.
Any manufacturer that mines has an inherent conflict of interest with its customers especially when it can delay shipment (and keep mining for itself) without any real consequences.
Let's face facts here. Conflict or not, every manufacturer mines with their own equipment. This is no secret. I'm pretty sure even BitMain has a farm of some sort.
I don't think they've denied it. In fact I think they've been open about it. "Spoondoodles" denies it.
While I don't feel very comfortable jumping into a competitor thread, I do would like to emphasize that we are committed to what we have have said before - none of our client units will be used for self-mining, beyond a standard burn-in test, with resulting proceeds will be publicly donated to a charity. Moreover, these clients who decide to use our upcoming hosted plan, will have the burn-in proceeds going immediately to their own set-up wallets.
This is part of company ethos, insisted by our investors and one of the reasons that I personally have joined them in the first place. We are (still) a start-up sized team, so any generated BTC during testing, tuning, etc... are completely transparent and being accounted in for the future charity proceeds.